VOIP on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

I ended my previous article (Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet) by saying that the release of the OS 2006 prepared the way for some serious VOIP work. The 770 can now make SIP-based VOIP phone calls and is more like what you'd expect from Nokia--a phone!

What does it take to upgrade the machine, and how difficult is it? As it happens, not much and not very, but when you're at risk of bricking the machine, there's always a certain level of anxiety.

The first step in the upgrade is to visit the Nokia 770 support site for a Windows download or Maemo's 770 download page for Linux and Mac OS X. Download the new OS. You need to provide the machine number of your 770; the download pages provide instructions on how to find it.

The next step is to do it! On Linux and Mac OS X, connect the 770 to the host machine with the USB cable and run a script while holding down the home button (and possibly your breath, as well). I flubbed my first attempt by letting go of the button too soon. The good news was that the only result was a failure notice on the host machine console:

Looks, etc.

What you get is an updated interface with more operations available from the desktop.

This is the same process I demonstrated in my previous article if you want to add to the basic Linux install by importing more apps such as the terminal. I'm using it and Joe to write this report (Emacs keystrokes just didn't work out for me on this machine, and I didn't get the hang of the double escapes with Vi either). There is a version of Vim that works quite well, though.

The catalog of apps is fairly similar, except there are some that haven't made it across yet, and some new ones as well.

I should put in a warning here about a theme called LCARS. It's a Star Trek thing, which looks pretty cool. The minus side starts with hard-to-see fonts in daylight. From there, it grew significantly worse on my configuration, with corrupted data files and various apps refusing to start. The problem, I think, is that this theme is very weighty for this machine, and the OS doesn't so far degrade very nicely when it runs out of memory. This only affected runtime files, so an uninstall followed by a couple of reboots seemed to fix everything.

At least, that was true for me on release 1 of OS 2006. The recently released update cured all those problems on my machine. LCARS now runs like a charm and looks pretty good as well.

Another tangent is email. The bundled client is quite OK for dealing with a few emails but it gets old very quickly if you get lots. For example, you can't tag emails so deleting quite a few is a major pain. It won't handle groups at all and GMail isn't all that great, either.

Pine to the rescue! I used to prefer Mutt but it isn't available for this platform, and I'm on the road and don't have a suitable machine to do it myself. Anyway, running Pine on the 770 is way cool. The easiest way to get it is to add http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/nokia770 mistral user to your repositories list, update available packages, and get Pine.

If you're new to Pine, the best way to edit the config file .pinerc is through the internal setup within the program. Be sure to enable the mouse in xterm, as this allows you to tap options on the screen rather than having to drop down the menu item in the improved Xterm that will send a Ctrl signal. Another note: as initially configured, the emails you send will come from User. This is easy to fix. See Jimc's Nokia 770 page for details.